Abstract

This chapter adopts a resolutely state-theoretical but not state-centred approach to the emerging Europolity and its role in economic and political restructuring. It argues that an adequate account of these topics must relate it to more general changes in the political economy of capitalism and the political economy of the modern state â�� in part because the European Union is itself an integral moment therein. It also argues that recent changes in the economic and political organization of the EU point to the development of a relatively novel form of political regime. The previously dominant but competing state-centred and governance-centred paradigms cannot grasp the distinctiveness of this emerging regime. I therefore introduce an alternative approach based on the strategic-relational approach to the state before summarizing recent changes in the capitalist type of state and describing some more general changes in the modern state. I then consider the EU as an emerging form of statehood.